Tim Blair
–,
Tuesday,
October,
06,
2009,(11:04am)

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
October,
05,
2009,(11:22pm)

Reader Cuckoo emails:

I’m currently in London, and was watching the TV quiz show University Challenge, which you probably know – two teams of four university whiz kids answer general knowledge questions, under the baleful eye of Jeremy Paxman.

One round involved identifying pictures of various world leaders who’d attended the recent G20. First slide was a picture of Kevin Rudd with his wife. Dead silence. NOT ONE of the eight contestants had the faintest idea who this man was.

Sadly, BBC online video is not viewable in Australia. If anyone in the UK is able to locate and forward the abovementioned clip, I will burn a wicker man in their honour.

Imagine the stress upon the time/space continuum when these two get together with Australia’s Prime Minister, who was raised in Queensland by his wife’s mother in Adelaide and observed events in Brisbane that took place weeks later in Perth. Can history survive this torment? Is it sustainable?

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
October,
05,
2009,(4:17am)

The New York Times – recently busted for deleting embarrassing Barack Obama quotes – also removed these lines (describing Chinese President Hu Jintao) from an item on Beijing’s big commie parade:

“There was moment when Hu broke into a nearly human-like expression, when he saw the girls in the miniskirts.” said Mr. Barmé, of Sydney. But his overall assessment of the parade? “Incredibly dull.”

The quote survives at Sweetness & Light and many Chinese blogs, but is now missing from the original Times piece – which does, however, record that Hu’s troop review was conducted from “the open sunroof of a Chinese-made 12-cylinder Red Flag limousine”. The Red Flag is what you end up with after six decades of communism: a munted, hypersized version of an Austin 1100 with an idiot sticking out the top.

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
October,
05,
2009,(4:14am)

The pain started out mildly, but I knew from past experience that this would build to a delightful fiery sensation. I was even looking forward to it. But the moment soon passed. In a matter of seconds I was in agony. After maybe a minute I was frightened that I might die. After five I was frightened that I might not.

The searing fire had surged throughout my head. My eyes were streaming. Molten lava was flooding out of my nose. My mouth was a shattered ruin. Even my hair hurt …

Even now, the following morning, I feel weak, shell-shocked, like I may die at any moment. And all I’d ingested was a drop.

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
October,
05,
2009,(4:03am)

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually …

Warmer? Hotter? Burnier?

… cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Welcome to the scientific consensus of 1974, when looming cold menaced Iceland and chased valuable armadillos out of Indiana:

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F.

Note how precisely the language is repeated in modern warmy talk, right down to an ominous “tipping point”:

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth’s surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

Can’t disagree with this, however, from University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare:

Warns Hare: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row.”

Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously.

Tim Blair
–,
Monday,
October,
05,
2009,(3:03am)

The biggest disappointment of the weekend is Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture). After a $57K per theatre average on 4 screens last weekend, the picture broke to a wider 962 locations with terrible results. The “documentary” only sold an estimated $1.3M in tickets to start the weekend, and it will finish at about $3.9M for a PTA of less than $4,000.